This is my personal blog for tracking my hobby programming development. Any opinions expressed here do not represent my employer in any way.

Saturday, June 2, 2012

Progress update for 5/26/2012 - 6/1/2012

This week:

Fixed my timestep. This was the end result of debugging some physics problems. I also got to change all my constants afterwards to prevent my player from flying off the screen at every opportunity. Something else I learned about while talking to my roommate about this problem was sweep tests. This sounds like a good idea and as soon as I decide that I have need for it, I'll be implementing it in my own stuff.

Read about Tiled and considered using it in place of my own map editor that I've been working on. Tiled has a lot of nice features for map editing that would help me create maps much much much faster than my own map editor will when I'm done with it (because there's no way I'm going to put in more work than I need to into it). I looked into what I would need to do in order to get Tiled to save in my map format that I've been developing. Here is a link I found about writing a plugin to get Tiled to save in your format. I decided ultimately that although Tiled is a great looking program, I would have to include it in my plans from the beginning next time to use it effectively. This time, I think I'll be better off working on this myself.

Added a life bar for the player. It's position is a bit close to the screen edge, but that can be fixed later.

Worked on the map editor more. Much more. Also thought about how best to integrate my level files from the map editor into the game program.

Didn't get to work as much as I wanted to this week on my project. This weekend I'm either going to work on making a visible change in the level architecture or implementing some enemy AI via finite state automata. Below is a picture of my only visible change this week, the health bar: